“…U.S. officials now believe there are hundreds of Al Qaeda cadres operating in Iraq. It is not plausible that Saddam remains blind to their presence. ‘In a vicious, repressive dictatorship that exercises near-total control over its population,’ Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld pointed out last August [20, 2002], ‘it’s very hard to imagine that the government is not aware of what’s taking place in the country.’ ”
– Lawrence F. Kaplan and William Kristol, The War Over Iraq, Page 24